Well, so far my Flash free Mac is working great. I haven’t missed Flash at all. Since a web browser communicates back to a site what technology it supports, what I am finding is that sites that were really annoying with Flash enabled, like the local The Age newspaper and the News Ltd Australian site are much less annoying since, rather than serving up Flash content, those sites just substitute still image ads that are not intrusive.
I have been in the habit for some time now of using my iPad to explore more potentially problematic sites (sites that might host trojans and malware. This includes many of the smaller blogs I visit for articles about photography and writing, as well whenever I am googling for equipment or software suppliers, or indeed googling most things. The list of sites Google returns will sometimes include quite questionable sites. The ones I’ve encountered are often when searching for software and you land on these sites that supposedly offer software reviews but seem more to be a revenue raiser from ads with little really meaningful comment. Discussion forums can also be a problem from a malware perspective. So I use my iPad. It’s less likely to get infected with anything and keeps those problems away from my production systems.
My Mac is noticeably faster without Flash running and the extra memory I installed is also improving things substantially, Photoshop being particularly happier.
Now to continue my quest for a simpler, faster technological life.
Applications like Word and Photoshop are wonderful but frequently do so much more than you need. They also are large applications that hog resources. Now this is much less of an issue for those who tend to run one or two applications at a time, but for what I do it is not uncommon for me to have six apps on the go, sometimes more. So I am going to look for smaller, more focused applications that I can use when I do not need all the features of the big software.
Wordprocessing looks an easy solve. For some purposes TextEdit is fine. I have Pages and I already use Scrivener for my novel work. I will look at this and see what sort of footprint it has on the machine when running. There are also lots of other simple wordprocessor options out there.
An alternative to Photoshop may be tougher, but I will start looking.
I’ll keep you informed.